Traindom.com Review

Traindom is a website that lets you create beginner membership sites quickly and easily. It was created solely for beginners that want to start selling information products or memberships and don’t want to fuss with WordPress, content management systems, or other complicated hosting solutions. In this respect, it surpasses all expectations. In other respects, it fails. Read on for my detailed review.

Traindom Updates

October 1st, 2012: Update A lot has changed at Traindom since my review 2 years ago and this deserves a revisit. I’m thoroughly impressed with the new features and updates.

April 18th, 2013: Traindom is being sold. The future of the website is uncertain.

Traindom: The Good

I have been involved in the creation of membership sites for quite some time. Setting them up is very complicated and time-consuming. Sometimes I find myself spending a solid 4 to 16 hours getting the pages, products, and sales funnel just right.

Honestly, Traindom removed the amount of time it takes to create a membership site. I had mine up and running within 30 minutes. They host everything including the sales page, dripped membership content (allows for time-released content distribution based on a member’s sign-up date), members forum (allows for member discussion) and they also manage the payment process (as of this writing, the only suitable payment option for US customers is PayPal). Edit: They now offer Paypal, Clickbank and Authorize.net.

Here’s another thing I really like about Traindom. They can automatically e-mail your members when their upcoming time-released content becomes available. This can help retain members and improve overall satisfaction since it’s quite nice to be e-mailed a reminder when content becomes available. This is rarely found in 3rd party providers.

In regards to setting up a membership site quickly and easily, Traindom exceeded my expectations. However, beginners should keep the upcoming points in mind. These could be critical to your growth in your Internet marketing business.

NEW!They have a flexible pricing and coupon system that enables you to charge for your product in all the ways you can imagine.

NEW! They have landing page management which lets your create salespages or lead capture pages. They also have a pre-written sales page for the weight loss market. More importantly, their web pages are responsive which means they’ll scale down to mobile devices.

Traindom: The Bad

Although I found Traindom quite refreshing for setting up membership sites quickly, I also found a few drawbacks. These drawbacks won’t become apparent until your membership model is blossoming. At that point, it can become stifling for your business. Allow me to explain…

No upsells. You’re only allowed to create one membership inside of Traindom. You cannot cross promote or upgrade members to a better plan.

Let’s use an example for this one. Let’s say you’re offering training videos for dog owners. You decide to sell a basic training package for $10/month. After six months and hundreds of conversations in the forum, you realize your basic training package needs to be expanded. You decide to create an intermediate training product. Traindom does not allow you to create an extra membership to “upgrade” members. You would need to create a brand-new account and pay a brand-new monthly fee for that account. All of a sudden, your loyal members are clicking back and forth between two completely different sites with two completely different discussion areas and videos. Who really wants to jump back and forth between 2 sites for “upgraded” memberships?

No affiliate program. If you want to build your membership site, you need to do it yourself. Forget about recruiting affiliates or salespeople. You will need to drive traffic to your own site. I cannot express the necessity for an affiliate program enough. There are many people out there that are capable of driving traffic much better than you. You want these people to promote your product for you. Traindom does not let them. It’s kind of funny, because they have their own affiliate program. 🙂 I guess they see the value in it as well.

NEW! Clickbank Affiliate Program: Since they’ve integrated Clickbank, you can now run your own Affiliate program using Clickbank. This is an enormous help in building an affiliate base for vendors. Using Clickbank is also a huge benefit since they manage the affiliate payouts which removes the 1099 tax burden from your shoulders.

URL Lockin. This is one of my biggest issues online in today’s market. I never recommend putting your URL’s in somebody else’s hands. This advice also goes for Bit.ly, TinyURL, Linktrackr and other solutions. With Traindom, you are given a subdomain at the Traindom.com site. If you ever decide to leave Traindom, you lose that URL and any backlinks you’ve created will become null and void. So, if you’ve been writing articles to promote your membership site, you’re out of luck. The easiest way to bypass this, is to use a redirect domain in all your promotional efforts. You should be doing this anyways to find out where your best traffic is coming from. Keep in mind, however, most people will bookmark the Traindom site…not your redirect link. If you decide to leave, you have to notify your members of the new domain name to access your membership. This can prove to be a large setback to your business and monthly income. Especially if members do not transfer over their subscriptions.

NEW! Custom Domains. Traindom now offers you the ability to use your own domain name for your membership. This is a welcome addition and a huge feature. Even if you move away from Traindom in the future, your backlinks and promotional efforts are not lost. Huge win.

NEW! Mobile-Ready and HTML5 Video: Their memberships are mobile-ready. Your clients can watch your videos on iPhones, iPads and other mobile devices. You can also embed your own HTML5 videos hosted somewhere else. If you want to use Traindom for video hosting, it’s included. You can upload videos straight inside Traindom. This means you don’t have to waste money on an external video streaming service. All the videos are private: only your paying customer can see them. And the video streaming is quite fast thanks for Viddler servers.

Traindom: The Cost

NEW! The pricing plan is quite fair. The first 30 days are free. After that, it’s $5/mth for up to 10 clients. Then they start charging based on your revenue. Up to $1000 revenue is $24/mo .Up to $3000 revenue is $47/mo and over $3000 revenue is $99/mo. It’s a very attractive offering because it lets beginner marketers get started for free and work their way towards a sensible membership solution that pays for itself.

Conclusion

Traindom is a great solution for beginners that want to get their site up and running quickly. For this sole purpose, I recommend Traindom. Sometimes, it’s more important to get money in your account than to search for the perfect solution. I’ve seen a lot of people get stuck with creating funnels that never make it to market. Traindom literally removes this obstacle.

That said, keep in mind you will need to create your own traffic. This is not a one-click magic bullet solution. If you cannot drive traffic, your membership will never take off. I hope the guys at Traindom read this review and consider adding the options above. I realize this can complicate a “beginner” solution, but if you can’t scale your business properly, nobody wins.

October 1st, 2012 Update: As of my revision on October 2012, I can see that the owner has fixed every major issue above except for upsells. And I can’t really blame them for that one. Upsells are normally offered via Authorize.net and Traindom also provides Paypal/Clickbank. This makes it harder to integrate and offer the feature to all his members. And if you really want upsells, the cheapest solution out there is a minimum of $97/mth and requires Authorize.net only to work (common requirement). I can see this being a rock solid solution for anyone wanting to roll out a membership site quickly and efficiently. Good work, Traindom!

About Jesus Perez

I've been marketing online since 1999 in the field of product creation, email marketing, affiliate marketing and integration marketing. I live in South Florida with my beautiful wife and family.

Comments

Hi Jesus
This is Peep from Traindom. Thanks for a great and honest overview. We appreciate feedback from marketers such as yourself to constantly improve our product.

We have a team of developers working on Traindom non-stop. The shortcomings that you mentioned are already in our to-do list among many other upcoming features. The ability to run the site from your own domain, creating upsells and having an affiliate program (both built-in and the option to integrate external softwares such as with Clickbank, RAP and others) will all be available within coming months.

I’ll get in touch when the features you needed the most will be available. You can keep up with our developments yourself via our blog or newsletter.

Peep, I’ve updated the review. The old one was 2 years old and it wasn’t giving you the justice you deserve. You’ve done a fantastic job updating Traindom and keeping it fair for beginner marketers. I’m going to start pointing more eyes towards your service.

Hi, Thank you for this great review! I appreciate your detailed analysis. Can you tell me if you’ve explored and/or written any thoughts on similar sites like Odijoo or Learnopia? Any feedback you can offer is helpful.